With tariffs kicking in, economic growth slowing, and Trump refusing to rule out a recession, the Federal Reserve has lowered its forecast for GDP growth through 2027 to well below 2%.  But liberals who want to push back by charting their own alternative path to robust growth are falling into a trap of wishful thinking. 

Witness Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance, touted as the magic ticket to re-energize flailing American liberalism. Klein, an influential liberal commentator, pitched it as a “Liberal Answer to the Trump-Musk Wrecking Ball.” 

They contend we can grow our way out of the malaise and high prices that led to Trump’s rise by rolling back environmental regulations, safety standards and labor protections, which they say have stifled construction and technological innovation. That would result in abundant housing, “green” infrastructure, and prosperity for all, they argue.

Abundance liberalism is a branch of the YIMBY movement (short for “Yes In My BackYard”) whose smug moniker is a polemic meant to discredit and dismiss NIMBY (“Not in My Backyard”) activists who fought the siting of nuclear power plants, toxic waste sites, and most recently, dense housing developments in their neighborhoods. YIMBIES claim that the key to make housing affordable is to build more of it, and to get rid of zoning laws that prevent dense private development in residential neighborhoods. But there is little evidence this alleviates the affordable housing crisis, and lots of evidence it enriches tech executives, investment bankers, realtors and builders. 

In general, supply-side solutionism failed to achieve the social goods for which we once looked to regulation. That should give us pause when we’re told the power of the free market will solve social ills, and that continually rising economic output will lift all boats. Today’s rapidly metastasizing ecological and social crises can’t be solved by market and technological forces that caused them. 

Yes, affordable housing is in short supply. But encouraging developers to profit more by building more won’t solve the problem and will introduce new ones. It would require vast amounts of raw materials including steel and concrete, which account for a sizable portion of global carbon emissions and cannot be decarbonized at scale. 

There are better ways to make housing affordable than trusting the free market, such as rent controls, community land trusts, and housing cooperatives that restrict resale value. Liberalism should embrace those. 

Ditto for building clean energy infrastructure to phase out fossil fuels. So long as populations, economies, and energy demand continue to grow, the “clean energy transition” will remain a delusion. While solar and wind technologies proliferated since 2000, global coal use also went up over 80% during the same period.

Building out solar and wind requires vast quantities of concrete and steel, as well as ten times more land than fossil fuels for the same unit of energy produced. It also needs lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other metals whose extraction ravages ecosystems, pollutes water supplies, displaces indigenous populations, and itself requires massive amounts of fossil fuel energy. Solar panels and wind turbines we build today will have to be rebuilt in 20 or 30 years, requiring inputs of scarce materials that cannot be completely recycled. 

In short, Klein and Thompson’s “liberalism that builds” is a liberalism that drives us further into ecological overshoot. Virtually anything we build out to enable our numbers and footprint to continue to grow will only worsen the problem.

We live in an era in which human agricultural systems already cover 40 per cent of the planet’s ice-free land area.  83% of all wild mammals and half of plants have been wiped out and humans and their livestock comprise 96% of the mammalian biomass on earth. The mass of the human-made technosphere has exceeded the weight of all living things. Microplastics are ubiquitous in our surface waters and inside our bodies. In our lifetime, climate change will place increasing constraints on growth, which will be felt by the poorest first. 

We also live in a time of extraordinary wealth inequality, especially in the US. We could provide for the needs of all, including housing, through progressive taxation to redistribute the gross wealth amassed by the rich. 

Yet no recent US administration of either party has made any effort to reach for this low-hanging fruit of human well-being, and Klein and Thompson barely acknowledge it is there for the picking. Instead they rhapsodize over the abundance of the unchained human enterprise, without noting it comes at the direct expense of the abundance of nature. 

The ideology of endless growthism – the idea that we are entitled to grow our footprint, our economy and our population without limits – has lasted for 200 years, extended by fossil fuels and chemical-intensive farming. But we are coming to the end of that era. 

Our future well-being demands a new ethic of balance rather than unregulated, unlimited growth. It needs a strong social safety net, labor and environmental protections, and universal access to contraception and abortion care, so we can stabilize and shrink our footprint and our numbers toward true abundance, where humans, wildlife, and natural systems can thrive. 

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